City Questions Prosecutor in Stop-And-Frisk Lawsuit

Lawyers for the city challenged the decision by an official with the Bronx District Attorney to limit the prosecutions of people arrested for trespassing under a controversial New York Police Department program.

Testifying for the second straight day in Manhattan federal court as part of a sweeping lawsuit challenging one of the department’s stop and frisk tactics, Jeannette Rucker, who heads the Bronx District Attorney’s complaint room, described why she tossed arrests made under “Operation Clean Halls” — which targets trespassing in privately owned, low-income apartment buildings — unless the arresting officer was interviewed by prosecutors to ensure there was probable cause.

At the hearing seeking an injunction ordering city police to stop making such arrests, Rucker said she sent several letters dating back to 2009 to the New York Police Department relaying concerns that some trespassing arrests were improper and that judges were regularly dismissing cases.

Under the “Operation Clean Halls” program, police are authorized to enter the participating buildings, which would otherwise require permission from the owner or a warrant that would require a showing of probable cause. Once inside the Clean Halls buildings officers conduct roof-to-basement patrols and enforce trespassing laws. About 16,000 privately owned buildings participate in the program, which city officials have credited for crime reductions.

Rucker said what she found in the “Clean Halls” arrests was that her office had to decline to prosecute many cases in which police had only seen people leaving the building or in building vestibules for a very short time. The officers’ affidavits detailing the events that led to the arrests were suspiciously uniform, she said.

This past July, Rucker wrote to the NYPD and notified them that that trespassing arrests based solely on paperwork that contains an officer’s arrest affidavit would no longer be sufficient to prosecute cases. Prosecutors had to also interview the officer.

The result, Rucker testified on Tuesday, is that trespassing arrests made as part of the “Clean Halls” program are substantially down in the Bronx, as are the number of cases the district attorney’s office has had to decline to prosecute.

But Mark Zuckerman, a city attorney, sparred with Rucker about whether it was proper to arrest a drunken man passed out in the vestibule for trespassing, with Rucker taking the position that in that case the person should be awakened and made to move, not arrested. That caused Zuckerman to say, “You don’t like prosecuting these cases, do you?”

Rucker denied that and replied, “I’m not trying to get them to stop their arrests. I’m just trying to get them to do it right.”

Zuckerman challenged the senior prosecutor saying she overly relied on self-serving complaints from defense attorneys and the word of those who are now plaintiffs in the wide-ranging lawsuit against the city for the “Operation Clean Halls” program. He asked her if she could provide statistics to back up her assertions and specific cases of those being wrongly arrested as part of the program.

Rucker retorted that her letters complaining to the police about their questionable trespassing arrests were based on what her prosecutors were telling her and the fact that her office and judges were dismissing many of the cases. But she said, “I didn’t keep track of them.”

Rucker also acknowledged that the police department has taken steps to improve its training in regards to these types of stops. The city contends that the NYPD has put in place new training that addresses many of the concerns contained in the federal class-action lawsuit filed in March by the New York Civil Liberties Union and several other community groups and legal organizations.

After Rucker left the stand, several plaintiffs named in that suit were called as witnesses and told stories of being stopped for what they said was unfounded suspicion of trespassing.

Charles Bradley, 53 years old, said in May 2011 he was let into his girlfriend’s Bronx building on Taylor Avenue by a tenant who knew him only to find that his girlfriend wasn’t home. As he left the building, he said, a police van pulled up to the curb and asked him what he was doing there. He responded, “I’m here to see my young lady.”

Bradley said when he explained that he worked as a security guard, the officer snapped at him, “I’m trying to treat you like a gentleman and you want to act like a (expletive) animal. You’re going in.”

He was handcuffed and placed in the van, where police questioned him.

“They asked me about drugs, they asked me about guns, they asked me about this that and a third, but not about trespassing,” he said.

At the stationhouse, Bradley was strip searched and eventually released on a desk appearance ticket charging him with trespassing. The case, he said, was later dismissed by the Bronx District Attorney’s Office.

Asked by his attorney how the experience made him feel, Bradley answered, “extremely violated, to say that least.”

Other plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit testified about less traumatic stops.

Letitia Johnson Ledan said after she saw her husband being patted down in front of their building in the River Park Towers on Richman Plaza in the Bronx, she approached the officers to ask what was going on. The officer demanded she show identification to prove she lived there and then left after reviewing it.

“He was standing in front of me and I had to give him my ID so I felt like I was stopped too,” she said.

Ledan’s testimony prompted Justice Shira Scheindlin–who is presiding over two other ground-breaking lawsuits related to different police initiatives involving the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice–to ask Zuckerman if it’s the city’s contention that Ledan was subject to arrest because she had passed a guardhouse in front of a roadway and sidewalks leading to her building. Mr. Zuckerman said it is.

The judge called the city’s assertion “troubling” and seemingly “counter-intuitive.”

“If you’re on one side of the booth you can be trespassing just by being there,” the judge asked. “I don’t understand it because it’s open to the public.”

Tamer El-Ghobashy contributed to this report

Corrections & Amplifications: An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to police officers’ authority to question people inside “Operation Clean Halls” building.